This is yet another foray into the "subscription model" of computer software. Companies, for a variety of reasons, often prefer to have a steady stream of revenue rather than non-recurring lump sums. Apparently, you can squeeze more blood from a stone if you do it very slowly.
It all boils down to whether it is better to rent, or to buy. Those who buy instead of rent usually pay more up front, but much less in the long run. I like things that can be paid off, will continue to work for as long as I wish to use it, and has resale value if I choose to stop. I am less enthusiastic about something that becomes useless if I miss a monthly payment. I chafe enough at cable, cell phone, and utility bills--I don't need one that meters my clock cycles and storage space.
Not that renting is all bad, of course, but it should always be nothing more than a temporary, short-term activity.
TANSTAAFL: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
"Free" services must be paid for with other revenue streams. In this case, as with many others, it is by selling more effective advertising. If you don't like it, pay for e-mail out of your own pocket. The control you gain over your own privacy is well worth the pittance that it costs.
And the amount you pay need not be in cash, either, if you happen to have a friend with a mail server and a link to the network. Would you like a shell account for a measly two beers per month, that you were probably spending anyway?
Solution: the button on the disk drive sends a request to the OS to dismount and eject the disk, and then patiently waits for the signal to eject before doing so. Holding the eject button down for n seconds causes the drive to stop waiting for the OS and eject the disk anyway.
This is, not coincidentally, similar to what the power button on a PC does now.
If the desired goal is to pay for maintenance and construction of state roads, then the optimal solution would be as follows:
The state reads a conveyance's odometer once per year. Less than 1% of all vehicles are read on any particular day.
The owner of record optionally files a form claiming that some portion of the distance was recorded either out of state or on private roadways.
The distance is multiplied by the cube of the weight of the conveyance. (approximates the vehicle-specific damage to roadways)
This number is multiplied by a constant factor, calculated from projected budget divided by total ton^3-miles for all vehicles, to determine the usage charge.
The owner of record pays the bill directly to the roadways fund. There are no discounts for being a corporation or a government: everyone pays the same rate.
The roadways fund pays for all repairs, maintenance, and construction on public roads.
But that is how a business would operate. To find out how a government would operate, take the rational business plan, throw it in a blender with 3 bullfrogs, a gallon of dung-flavored ice cream, and hair from an elder statesman, then puree until the motor burns out. Afterwards, bill the public for triple the actual cost of the roadways, skim half of that off the top, and burn half of what's left. With the remainder, do a half-assed job on the roads, and complain about inadequate funding. To actually collect the bill, assign one leeching bureaucrat to every productive person, to follow him around and assess a tax on everything he does. For best results, the tax on a person should have no relationship whatsoever to his actual use of the roads. Care should be taken to assess additional taxes, fines, fees, and penalties against anyone who questions the merits of the current system, and particularly anyone not likely to vote for you next election.
A site involved in pr0n-monkey CAPTCHA solving does not know the correct response to the CAPTCHA until after retransmitting it to the originating server. Sending a registration bot to the porn site, programmed to randomly guess at the re-presented CAPTCHA, would generate a spike in rejections from that site, which could then be blacklisted.
As we all know from watching movies, humanity cannot effectively combat an army of robots. Solution: recruit our own robots.
And if we can create AIs that can defeat CAPTCHAs, why can't we create AIs that can differentiate between human and bot?
I recall seeing a Russian Army prototype for an infantry mobility device on one of those science/invention shows on cable. The basic design was a gasoline-powered piston strapped to the user's leg. When the foot rolled forward in a normal run/jog, the piston would fire, giving a boost. The demonstration showed the guy jogging at 40 mi/hr, though I don't recall the range before refueling.
I thought, at the time, that it would be awesome for commuting. Better than a Segway, even.
While automatic data recorders would tend to vindicate the innocent, and condemn the guilty, that presumes that the activities ordinary people perceive as lawful will remain legal after the devices are installed. I simply don't trust any government or insurer to use that data recorder in my best interests.
And once I get into a wreck, I may not be able to control access to my data. Furthermore, if I do manage withhold it, that may be used as a pretext to presume guilt instead of innocence.
Re:Better than a Volcano
on
Hacking Vodka
·
· Score: 1
At Delaware, they denatured the anhydrous ethanol with phenolphthalein (the acid-base indicator). It wouldn't kill you, or make you blind, but horrible explosive diarrhea for three days would definitely make even the drinkiest drunk a stockroom teetotaler.
I have been looking for work in Chicago and Milwaukee for upwards of two years now. Nearly all of my interviews have been from 40 to 70 minutes driving time from my home. Most of the companies have been seeking to fill just one opening, and have received hundreds of resumes. For at least two of these jobs, I was passed over not because of my qualifications, but because I lived too far away.
The problem I see here is that companies are drafting their requirements to be overly specific, just to reduce the applicant pool. And when that strategy still produces a giant stack of resumes, the requirements are stretched further, often by someone who has no idea what the TLAs mean. So now jobs require 10 years of experience in.NET and C#, and the company is completely unwilling to train. And suddenly there are no qualified candidates. Well, duh.
It has gone to the point where the decision as to whether a candidate is qualified is split between a (badly-written) keyword search and an HR underling that is basically clueless.
For most geek-types, knowing how to program in any high-level language is equivalent to being able to program in any of them--it is just a matter of learning new punctuation. But the ability to learn any new technology by reading manuals does not match any keywords. One of the founding fathers of computer science could send in his resume, but if he fails to put "Interslice Bangwhatsit 2.0" on it, no one even knows he is looking for the job.
In summary, claims of worker shortages are bull. If these companies cannot find qualified candidates, it is only because their methods cannot determine who is actually qualified.
117 years ago, there were no nuclear reactors of any type. Do you seriously believe that in the next 117 years, there won't be another viable nuclear fuel source? Remember, in theory, according to the nuclear binding energy curve, elements lower than iron on the periodic table can be fused to produce energy, and elements higher can be split.
Mobil invented a methane-to-gasoline process, using zeolites, that can produce both gasoline and diesel fuel. You can extract methane out of practically any biological waste material or other biomass. It is easy to grow plants for a methane source; it is easy to collect human waste; it is easy to pipeline methane in from natural gas wells.
You can turn anything into vehicle fuel, as long as you have the energy to do it. It would be counterproductive to use a fossil-fuels powered plant to power the process, but nuclear energy would be perfect for the job. Imagine a slug of uranium turning tonnes of dung into automobile, truck, and airplane fuel.
Rotting biomass can be synthesized into gasoline using the Mobil zeolite process. A large plant was built in Motunui, New Zealand, that supplies a significant fraction of that country's fuel demands. I see no obstacle to powering such a plant with nuclear power instead of using the reactor to drive an electricity-producing turbine. But I am neither a nuclear engineer nor a chemical engineer.
Replace humans with computers running flawed and insecure code, and you gain a small amount of precision at the expense of a huge amount of accuracy.
A machine can make the same factor-of-ten error a thousand times over before a human finally figures out that a decimal point is in the wrong place.
The bbv.org FOIA requests are specifically targeted at the computerized results, particularly those involving DES's GEMS software, which has repeatedly been exposed on this and other sites as the most badly-designed program EVAR!!!111!! (But seriously, DES left quite a few back doors open, including one that had no discernable purpose other than election fraud.) These requests are as much about convincing counties that maintaining a verifiable audit trail is good in and of itself as they are about independantly verifying the results of this particular election.
Hitler lost the elections--twice. He staged his very own version of 9/11, the Reichstag fire, in order to bully the winner, von Hindenburg, into appointing him chancellor and granting him emergency powers.
Considering the mess that professional politicians have created in the U.S. over the last 80 years, I would much rather see a few geeks give it a shot.
The worst case scenario I can imagine is that the entire federal government is replaced by a very small script.
There is one candidate that routinely wins a larger number of votes than the margin between the two major-party candidates--none of the above. I'd guess that a good portion of Badnarik's support is drawn from potential voters that would otherwise steer clear of the voting booth on election day. It is ridiculous to claim that minor-party support is somehow leeched from the two major parties when there is a vast, vast pool of voters that prefer making no selection at all to picking between Republican and Democrat.
The difference is akin to dropping a rock and hitting a dime and accomplishing the same task with a plumb bob. The difficulty level is lowered further if you are allowed to move the dime in the process.
The assumption involved in the "relative" is the difference between the tech level needed to build a space elevator and that needed to build a floating port on the surface of the ocean.
A ballistic missile can hit a very tiny area, and that is essentially dropped from orbit at high speed, not lowered slowly.
A space elevator would not so much be "put up" as "lowered down". The energy and materials requirements for lowering a cable from orbit are drastically different from building a tower to the stars.
When you lower a cable, it is relatively easy to anchor it to a floating platform in the middle of the ocean. Therefore, there is no worry about equatorial real estate, local population, eminent domain, or other government-dominated nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
Sending a cease & desist letter is defending your trademark.
This is yet another foray into the "subscription model" of computer software. Companies, for a variety of reasons, often prefer to have a steady stream of revenue rather than non-recurring lump sums. Apparently, you can squeeze more blood from a stone if you do it very slowly.
It all boils down to whether it is better to rent, or to buy. Those who buy instead of rent usually pay more up front, but much less in the long run. I like things that can be paid off, will continue to work for as long as I wish to use it, and has resale value if I choose to stop. I am less enthusiastic about something that becomes useless if I miss a monthly payment. I chafe enough at cable, cell phone, and utility bills--I don't need one that meters my clock cycles and storage space.
Not that renting is all bad, of course, but it should always be nothing more than a temporary, short-term activity.
TANSTAAFL: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
"Free" services must be paid for with other revenue streams. In this case, as with many others, it is by selling more effective advertising. If you don't like it, pay for e-mail out of your own pocket. The control you gain over your own privacy is well worth the pittance that it costs.
And the amount you pay need not be in cash, either, if you happen to have a friend with a mail server and a link to the network. Would you like a shell account for a measly two beers per month, that you were probably spending anyway?
Solution: the button on the disk drive sends a request to the OS to dismount and eject the disk, and then patiently waits for the signal to eject before doing so. Holding the eject button down for n seconds causes the drive to stop waiting for the OS and eject the disk anyway.
This is, not coincidentally, similar to what the power button on a PC does now.
If the desired goal is to pay for maintenance and construction of state roads, then the optimal solution would be as follows:
But that is how a business would operate. To find out how a government would operate, take the rational business plan, throw it in a blender with 3 bullfrogs, a gallon of dung-flavored ice cream, and hair from an elder statesman, then puree until the motor burns out. Afterwards, bill the public for triple the actual cost of the roadways, skim half of that off the top, and burn half of what's left. With the remainder, do a half-assed job on the roads, and complain about inadequate funding. To actually collect the bill, assign one leeching bureaucrat to every productive person, to follow him around and assess a tax on everything he does. For best results, the tax on a person should have no relationship whatsoever to his actual use of the roads. Care should be taken to assess additional taxes, fines, fees, and penalties against anyone who questions the merits of the current system, and particularly anyone not likely to vote for you next election.
A site involved in pr0n-monkey CAPTCHA solving does not know the correct response to the CAPTCHA until after retransmitting it to the originating server. Sending a registration bot to the porn site, programmed to randomly guess at the re-presented CAPTCHA, would generate a spike in rejections from that site, which could then be blacklisted.
As we all know from watching movies, humanity cannot effectively combat an army of robots. Solution: recruit our own robots.
And if we can create AIs that can defeat CAPTCHAs, why can't we create AIs that can differentiate between human and bot?
I have heard this phenomenon referred to as "mosaic karyotype".
Pigs are as smart as--if not smarter than--dogs. The only edge cats have over either is that they don't eat poop.
I recall seeing a Russian Army prototype for an infantry mobility device on one of those science/invention shows on cable. The basic design was a gasoline-powered piston strapped to the user's leg. When the foot rolled forward in a normal run/jog, the piston would fire, giving a boost. The demonstration showed the guy jogging at 40 mi/hr, though I don't recall the range before refueling.
I thought, at the time, that it would be awesome for commuting. Better than a Segway, even.
While automatic data recorders would tend to vindicate the innocent, and condemn the guilty, that presumes that the activities ordinary people perceive as lawful will remain legal after the devices are installed. I simply don't trust any government or insurer to use that data recorder in my best interests.
And once I get into a wreck, I may not be able to control access to my data. Furthermore, if I do manage withhold it, that may be used as a pretext to presume guilt instead of innocence.
At Delaware, they denatured the anhydrous ethanol with phenolphthalein (the acid-base indicator). It wouldn't kill you, or make you blind, but horrible explosive diarrhea for three days would definitely make even the drinkiest drunk a stockroom teetotaler.
I have been looking for work in Chicago and Milwaukee for upwards of two years now. Nearly all of my interviews have been from 40 to 70 minutes driving time from my home. Most of the companies have been seeking to fill just one opening, and have received hundreds of resumes. For at least two of these jobs, I was passed over not because of my qualifications, but because I lived too far away.
The problem I see here is that companies are drafting their requirements to be overly specific, just to reduce the applicant pool. And when that strategy still produces a giant stack of resumes, the requirements are stretched further, often by someone who has no idea what the TLAs mean. So now jobs require 10 years of experience in .NET and C#, and the company is completely unwilling to train. And suddenly there are no qualified candidates. Well, duh.
It has gone to the point where the decision as to whether a candidate is qualified is split between a (badly-written) keyword search and an HR underling that is basically clueless.
For most geek-types, knowing how to program in any high-level language is equivalent to being able to program in any of them--it is just a matter of learning new punctuation. But the ability to learn any new technology by reading manuals does not match any keywords. One of the founding fathers of computer science could send in his resume, but if he fails to put "Interslice Bangwhatsit 2.0" on it, no one even knows he is looking for the job.
In summary, claims of worker shortages are bull. If these companies cannot find qualified candidates, it is only because their methods cannot determine who is actually qualified.
All links taken from Google, so YMMV.
117 years ago, there were no nuclear reactors of any type. Do you seriously believe that in the next 117 years, there won't be another viable nuclear fuel source? Remember, in theory, according to the nuclear binding energy curve, elements lower than iron on the periodic table can be fused to produce energy, and elements higher can be split.
Mobil invented a methane-to-gasoline process, using zeolites, that can produce both gasoline and diesel fuel. You can extract methane out of practically any biological waste material or other biomass. It is easy to grow plants for a methane source; it is easy to collect human waste; it is easy to pipeline methane in from natural gas wells.
You can turn anything into vehicle fuel, as long as you have the energy to do it. It would be counterproductive to use a fossil-fuels powered plant to power the process, but nuclear energy would be perfect for the job. Imagine a slug of uranium turning tonnes of dung into automobile, truck, and airplane fuel.
Rotting biomass can be synthesized into gasoline using the Mobil zeolite process. A large plant was built in Motunui, New Zealand, that supplies a significant fraction of that country's fuel demands. I see no obstacle to powering such a plant with nuclear power instead of using the reactor to drive an electricity-producing turbine. But I am neither a nuclear engineer nor a chemical engineer.
Replace humans with computers running flawed and insecure code, and you gain a small amount of precision at the expense of a huge amount of accuracy.
A machine can make the same factor-of-ten error a thousand times over before a human finally figures out that a decimal point is in the wrong place.
The bbv.org FOIA requests are specifically targeted at the computerized results, particularly those involving DES's GEMS software, which has repeatedly been exposed on this and other sites as the most badly-designed program EVAR!!!111!! (But seriously, DES left quite a few back doors open, including one that had no discernable purpose other than election fraud.) These requests are as much about convincing counties that maintaining a verifiable audit trail is good in and of itself as they are about independantly verifying the results of this particular election.
Remember people - Hitler was "elected" too.
Hitler lost the elections--twice. He staged his very own version of 9/11, the Reichstag fire, in order to bully the winner, von Hindenburg, into appointing him chancellor and granting him emergency powers.
Considering the mess that professional politicians have created in the U.S. over the last 80 years, I would much rather see a few geeks give it a shot.
The worst case scenario I can imagine is that the entire federal government is replaced by a very small script.
What about the plasmid genome? Just because it has cardinality zero in humans doesn't mean it should be ignored.
There is one candidate that routinely wins a larger number of votes than the margin between the two major-party candidates--none of the above. I'd guess that a good portion of Badnarik's support is drawn from potential voters that would otherwise steer clear of the voting booth on election day. It is ridiculous to claim that minor-party support is somehow leeched from the two major parties when there is a vast, vast pool of voters that prefer making no selection at all to picking between Republican and Democrat.
The difference is akin to dropping a rock and hitting a dime and accomplishing the same task with a plumb bob. The difficulty level is lowered further if you are allowed to move the dime in the process.
The assumption involved in the "relative" is the difference between the tech level needed to build a space elevator and that needed to build a floating port on the surface of the ocean.
A ballistic missile can hit a very tiny area, and that is essentially dropped from orbit at high speed, not lowered slowly.
A space elevator would not so much be "put up" as "lowered down". The energy and materials requirements for lowering a cable from orbit are drastically different from building a tower to the stars.
When you lower a cable, it is relatively easy to anchor it to a floating platform in the middle of the ocean. Therefore, there is no worry about equatorial real estate, local population, eminent domain, or other government-dominated nonsense.
Perhaps that should be one subjective second per objective second?